Download A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, by Karen Armstrong PDF

"An admirable and ambitious paintings of synthesis that may supply perception and pride to millions of lay readers."
THE WASHINGTON submit ebook WORLD

In this stunningly clever e-book, Karen Armstrong, considered one of Britain's superior commentators on non secular affairs, strains the historical past of the way women and men have perceived and skilled God, from the time of Abraham to the current. From classical philsophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the trendy age of skepticism, Karen Armstrong plays the close to miracle of distilling the highbrow historical past of monotheism into one fantastically readable quantity, destined to take its position as a vintage.

Amid quite a bit twenty-first-century speak of a "Christian-Muslim divide"--and the attendant controversy in a few Western international locations over guidelines towards minority Muslim communities--a ancient truth has long past disregarded: for greater than 400 years starting within the mid-seventh century, a few 50 percentage of the world's Christians lived and worshipped lower than Muslim rule.

Lately, the time period "Abrahamic religions" has been used with exceeding frequency within the academy. We now on a regular basis come upon educational books, meetings, or even positions (including endowed chairs) dedicated to the so-called "Abrahamic religions. " yet what precisely are "Abrahamic religions"? even if many understand him because the universal denominator of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Abraham is still deceptively out of achieve.

Extra resources for A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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As something endowed by God, it contains a reactive instinct to cover the sexual organs and as a consequence man is moved to develop clothing. God’s miraculous involvement in human survival is exemplified in implanting a sense of shame in humans which compels them to speedily react and develop some form of clothing. 68 He explains that Abel is the one who brought into existence this art [animal husbandry (himṣe’t mezonot)] and Cain brought into existence the art of agriculture (melekhet ‘avodat ha-’adama).

Couldn’t he have come up with these ideas without Aristotle? ” My response is that Gersonides’ entire philosophic career in physics, astronomy, logic, biology and others is centered around commenting on Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle. It would be a bit odd for him to suddenly decide when it comes to ethics and politics that Aristotle is not the center of his oeuvre, especially when he makes references to both the Ethics and the Republic in his writings. 15. Comm Gen, 2. 16. 3). 17. For a discussion of parallel in the medieval Christian world, see: Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 1–13.

Because of this, their efforts will be repaid in that everyone will be gathered in one place in the land. In addition, in building this city, it will always increase their numbers. And God already saw that gathering man in one place in the world is not fitting for the existence of the human species, since if there is a catastrophe in one part of the world, if from a noise and shifting of a wind in the belly of the world, if from a strong wind that dismantles mountains and breaks stones, if from stones of crystal, if from flood of water or other similar catastrophic reasons.